His love of words came before the poetry. He was an only child on a farm in Bunyah, central NSW, and he taught himself to read. He didn't go to school until he was nine. But his mother had magazines and when she saw he was engaging with the likes of The Australian Women's Weekly she got him a few "baby books that I couldn't tear up, to learn A for apple and B [for] box and so on. But I'd already learned them."

He'd learned by tackling the big letters before moving onto the smaller ones. This was in the latter stages of World War II, so words such as Normandy were among the first he could recognise. By his teens, he had all the words in the world and nothing to do with them. Poetry, he says, was a place where he could employ them.

"I just needed a form that suited me. I thought I wanted to be a painter but couldn't paint. Thought I wanted to be a writer of novels but found myself bored. I found poetry and the lock sort of clicked open and I realised that's the one I want to do. It has satisfied me ever since."

In his poem The Instrument, Murray wrote: "Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment/For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike/down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment./For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb/before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond/your own intelligence. For not needing to rise/and betray the poor to do it. For a non-devouring fame."

Advertisement

Much as Murray would like to deny his "non-devouring" fame, he can't. He cuts a distinctive figure – substantial round the middle, shiny on top and loud in the laugh – but it is the poetry for which he is known, that and some of the wrangles he has been involved in over the years.

In Bunyah, no one makes a fuss of him. "You're still just Les Murray, Cecil's boy." But in a big city, he's recognised on average once a day, he says. Sometimes it tickles him. Once he was sitting in a square in Barcelona, chatting to one of his translators. "As I got up to go, two girls at the next table said, 'Good to see you here, Mr Murray. Hope you're having a good time.' I said to him, 'It cost me a bloody fortune to arrange that.' "

You will now receive updates fromEntertainment Newsletter

Entertainment Newsletter

The devouring fame that would come with the Nobel is why he remains distinctly ambivalent about the possibility, as frequently canvassed, of his becoming Australia's next literature laureate. Each November, he is invariably on the bookies' lists of favourites. At 71, he still has time. "It doesn't mean anything to me. I get a sense that it would be an enormous disaster in your life and turn you into a damned celebrity."

Murray brought out a new collection of poems, Taller When Prone, last month. He remains very much a working poet. He gives readings, he goes to writers' festivals, he submits poems to magazines and journals and he takes his work overseas to universities and festivals. In March, he was in China; later in the year he is due in Slovenia and Britain.

He once said that poetry was like dairy farming: a trade in which you make a living by bits and pieces and hope to God it adds up to an income. "Sometimes you have your bacon saved by a prize. This year we did all right because the Macquarie Dictionary gave me a waged job for going down there once a month to be a consultant. The University of Technology, Sydney gave me a sort of consultancy. Suddenly that's like two wages. I've had years of no wages."

The gig with the Macquarie – "an honest day's work, pulling words out of word lists" – is the perfect job for a man who suffers from what he calls "verberation", the state of having words running through your head all the time. And it gave him Infinite Anthology, a poem about definitions for the new book: "creators of single words or phrases are by far the largest class/of poets. Many ignore all other poetry."

It crept up on him, this love of words. "You just realise it's there, that you like language. I got into the common habit of nerdish children of overexplaining. I still do it. People's faces glaze over when I go on explaining how such and such happened. 'That was because Louis XIV decided his shoes were just not the right fit . . . ' and they're wishing they could be somewhere else."

Talking about Taller When Prone, I wonder what determines what goes into a collection. He says it depends on whether he is developing some sort of thesis. But in this case "it's just a set of poems". A poem gets in if it works. "The other ones are crumpled up and thrown in the waste bin."

His images are consistently remarkable. Take the opening lines of the first poem, From a Tourist Journal: "In a precinct of liver stone, high/on its dais, the Taj seems bloc hail." I wonder if he's a trained poetic observer, always on the lookout for things, but he reckons he's just casually drifting through life and letting things strike him. With the Taj Mahal, it was that its surface seemed to be glittering like hail – hail that was never going to thaw.

Murray has antagonised many people over the years, laying into the Australia Council's grants system despite having taken his fair share, feuding with other poets and squabbling with the then editor of Quadrant, Robert Manne, over a new direction for the conservative magazine of which Murray remains literary editor.

But that is in the past. Murray says he's a mellower figure these days. "I've got a lot saner for one thing. So's the society. The '60s are finally over." What irritated him about the '60s? "It was a dreadful period — hectoring and sort of mob government by manipulated fashions. Couldn't stand them."

And he has shaken off much of the depression he had, although "the black dog never dies; he's just not as loud, tucked away in his kennel". He still has dark moments. Recently he found it impossible to go to a granddaughter's birthday.

"The family went off grumbling, saying I was crazy. Of course I am – I've written books about it. An hour or so later I realised it was a flashback. It's 1951 and my mother is sending me away to live with her sister. She's pregnant, she's terrified she'll have another miscarriage, she doesn't want me around, I've never left home before and it's an absolutely desolating experience."

Murray realised that his granddaughter was turning 12, the age when he was sent packing and his mother was to die after a third miscarriage. "I sort of thought my way out of it."

There is one poem that he calls a throwback to the savage kind of poems he used to write. The 41st Year of 1968 is dedicated to the memory of the 173 people who died in the Victorian bushfires in February last year. It is, he says, the only angry poem in the book.

"I went for a drive up there and thought this is a bloody trap that didn't have to exist. The deaths didn't have to happen. The roads are too narrow, too steep. The timber up there is rubbish and not worth preserving.

"C. J. Dennis used to live at Toolangi [near Healesville]. I used to think, 'God it's beautiful but God it's a deathtrap.' Any bushie knows not to live that close to Australian forests. You can live close to rainforests but if there's gum trees there you don't do it."

Murray has favourite poems from his work, such as The Tin Wash Dish ("I showed them the inside of poverty") and in this new collection, Hesiod on Bushfire, "a much better poem than the angry one", and Port Jackson Greaseproof Rose, and The Conversations ("The light sort of dancing tone of it and the fact that it doesn't add up to much in the end but it's entertaining on the way"). He has even gone back and reworked a poem that first appeared in Conscious and Verbal, because he was unhappy with the way he had told the story of the killing of "Black Tommy McPherson".

But one thing that won't change is the dedication for all his books: "To the glory of God." Nobody mortal understands that, he says. "Whatever it is I'll go with it." So he confidently anticipates enountering God?

"I hope so. After I've passed through the big dark doors. Last time I went through the big dark doors [when he was in a three-week coma], I came back with a terrible need for Chinese food."

Taller When Prone is published by Black Inc, $24.95. Les Murray will be a guest at the Sydney Writers' Festival, May 15-23 (swf.org.au).